Tuesday, August 1, 2017

InsideView on Friday announced a consulting service to help B2B marketers implement account-based marketing.

Expert Service, the first in the firm’s planned series of InsideView Expert Services, delivers target market analytics and helps customers build a view of their total addressable market, or TAM, using a data visualization console.

InsideView’s TAM service is a blend of consulting, technology and data, noted Joe Andrews, VP for product and solution marketing at InsideView.

“There is strong market demand among B2B sales and marketing leaders who need help in operationalizing their ABM strategies,” he told CRM Buyer.

“ABM is a must-have for B2B, and identifying your TAM is a prerequisite for successful ABM,” he pointed out.

What the Console Offers

The visualization console displays clients’ sales and marketing data, letting them interact with their data in real time, then export and download a targeted list of accounts.

Clients then can compare the generated list against current target lists to fill in the white spaces — gaps in their current sales and marketing database.

They can massage the data and run what-if scenarios. A typical scenario might look at what accounts should be targeted, what contacts or people are affiliated with those accounts, and which accounts in the client’s white space look like ideal customers, Andrews said.

Clients have access to the console for the duration of their contract with InsideView.

The Long, Slow Crawl to ABM

More than 90 percent of marketers believed ABM was a B2B must-have, and more than 60 percent planned to invest in ABM technology over the coming 12 months, according to SiriusDecisions’s 2015 state of account-based marketing study.

Given the rapid pace of technology adoption in marketing, what’s taking companies so long to implement ABM?

“Few marketers have been able to measure their TAM on a regular basis because it’s very difficult,” InsideView’s Andrews explained. The main barriers are data silos and manual processes.

Eighty percent of B2B marketers’ inquiries to Constellation Research over the past year contained questions on account-based marketing, said Cindy Zhou, a principal analyst at the firm.

“Ninety-two percent indicated they have, or are planning to, start an ABM program in 2017,” she told CRM Buyer.

The challenge with implementing ABM is that it “requires coordinated effort between marketing and sales — and, I also suggest, the services team,” Zhou said. “One of the key steps is to first identify which accounts to target.”

Types of ABM Software

A variety of solutions that address a specific part of the ABM cycle, from account identification to campaign execution and account insights, is offered, Zhou noted.

Currently, many B2B marketers “are relying on a combination of their marketing automation solution and CRM data to implement basic ABM campaigns,” she said.

There are four categories of account-based marketing software, according to G2 Crowd:

Account-based execution;

Account-based reporting;

Marketing account intelligence; and

Marketing account management.

InsideView is represented in the marketing account intelligence area, company VP Andrews said, noting that “our Expert Services will help customers with that area and also account-based execution and account-based account management.”

Crying Need for Data Science Advice

More than half of companies in a recent survey reported zero to limited measurement of their TAM, Andrews said, referring to SiriusDecisions poll of the keynote audience at its 2017 summit conference, which drew more than 3,000 people.

The lack of data science experts has given rise to demand for expert services like InsideView’s offering, said Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research at Nucleus Research.

Most companies “are still evolving their ABM strategies — or just determining their strategy,” she told CRM Buyer.

InsideView’s datasets “are stronger for the United States market,” Zhou noted. “There could be gaps in the TAM estimates depending on the amount of business the organization conducts worldwide.”

Richard Adhikari has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, software development, mainframe and mid-range computing, and application development. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including Information Week and Computerworld. He is the author of two books on client/server technology.